Woman Makes 2nd Bid For Clemency

Defendant Claimed Abuse In '90 Killing

A former Carol Stream woman who pleaded guilty to killing a Carol Stream man who she said regularly abused her is again asking Gov. Jim Edgar for clemency.

Denise Trznadle, 31, has filed a petition with the Illinois Prisoner Review Board asking that she be released early from her 22-year prison sentence for the 1990 murder of Michael Rhodes, with whom she shared an apartment for a few months.

She has lost her appeal before the Illinois Appellate Court, and her attorney, Kathleen Zellner of Naperville, will ask the review board to let her client leave prison by way of a governor's pardon.

It is the second time Trznadle has made a plea to the governor for her freedom. She was a member of an 18-woman group who asked Edgar for clemency after committing violent crimes against men who abused them. While granting several of them clemency, Edgar refused Trznadle's request.

Late in 1990, the recently divorced Trznadle met Rhodes, 46, at a tavern and accepted an offer to share his Carol Stream apartment, at 628 Willow Wood Drive. She and her toddler daughter moved in with him.

In December 1990, she shot Rhodes in the back of his head while he apparently was sleeping. She wrapped the body in bed sheets, cleaned up bloodstains, burned incense, placed towels at the base of doors to reduce the smell and fled with her daughter, according to courtroom testimony.

The body was found in March the following year, when apartment managers entered the unit in response to complaints from neighbors about odors.

Trznadle was tracked to Phoenix, where she was living with friends. She was extradited to DuPage County, where she eventually pleaded guilty to murder after accepting an agreement to serve 22 years in prison. The minimum sentence in Illinois is 20 years.

Trznadle has contended that Rhodes regularly abused her, beat her, raped her as often as three times a day and threatened her and her daughter with a handgun. She contended she killed Rhodes because she needed to escape.

DuPage prosecutors argued that Trznadle had numerous chances over the two months she lived with Rhodes to report his violence to police and that she had the option of moving out of his apartment.

Trznadle was one of 18 women in Illinois prisons for whom clemency was sought in 1995 by the Illinois Clemency Project for Battered Women.

"I'm not going to ask for early release by repeating the story of the battered woman that she is," said Zellner. "She just wants out. She has been a good prisoner and a model prisoner, and she has a 10-year-old daughter that she wants to be a mother to."

The Prisoner Review Board is to hear the clemency request Thursday in the Thompson Center in downtown Chicago.

The agency's confidential recommendations are sent to Edgar, who usually makes his decision public a week or two after the hearing.

Jane Radostits, deputy chief of the criminal division of the DuPage County state's attorney's office, will argue before the board that the 22-year sentence was fair and that Trznadle should be required to complete it.

Under Illinois law in effect in 1992 when she pleaded guilty, she is required to serve half of her sentence if she is a good prisoner, making her eligible for release after 11 years.

From 1987 to 1994, Gov. Edgar granted clemency to 13 women because they had been abused.